DIY Checkers (with Addition and Subtraction)

When my son’s math summer camp ended, the teacher told me about the games they had played in class. Games? Really? He showed me the games and explained how each of them taught math skills – even strategy. I had no idea that chess was a math game, but apparently it is.

Since neither my husband nor I know how to play chess or, truthfully, really want to learn, I thought checkers might be a more agreeable game for our family. To prove that playing checkers truly was educational, I did what every person does when they have an unanswered question – I Googled it.

According to Misty Karam on LoveToKnow.com, checkers can teach important pre-math skills like sorting by color, directions (e.g. forward, backward, and diagonal), cause/effect, logical thinking, and reasoning. Cool, huh?

What you need:

1. 24 plastic bottle caps (or 12 of one kind, and 12 of another; it helps if the lids will nest inside one another when stacked)
2. Plain colored cardstock in two colors (if you plan to add math problems to your checkers board, make sure one of the papers is a light enough color that dry-erase ink will be legible)
3. 1 sheet of posterboard measuring 14-inches square (or larger)
4. 1 sheet of sticker paper (optional) or stickers
5. Dry-Erase markers (optional, if you laminate your board)

To make our checkers board, I used my Fiskars paper cutter and cut out 32 squares (measuring 1 ¾-inches) in one color paper and 32 squares of the same size from another color of paper. Then one by one my son and I glued these down, alternating the colors, onto a 14-inch square piece of posterboard. (You’ll end up with an 8 by 8 grid of squares.) Then I took the “board” to a local office paper/copy shop to be laminated.

Since I had plans to work some addition and subtraction practice into our checkers game, I designed circular plus and minus stickers to print on sticker paper and cut them out with my Martha Stewart Punch All Over the Page™ 1 ½-inch circle punch. These fit perfectly on the 24 plastic Gatorade bottle lids I’d saved during the summer. (You can download my lid stickers here. Truthfully, though, you don’t need these stickers or a fancy punch. Simply add 12 of the same stickers to the tops of half the lids so that you can distinguish between the two opponents’ checkers.)

Before we started to play, I added some subtraction and addition problems with a dry-erase marker to the game board on colored squares we’d be playing on (on our board, we play on the gray squares). Every time that my son jumped one of my checkers, he had to answer the math problem underneath. (Need a refresher on how to play checkers? I did. Go here.)

My son has played this game every day since we made it. He even wrote and illustrated his own checkers rule book (his own idea!). The kid is going crazy for this game, which makes saving the lids and gluing all those squares totally worth it in my book!

It’s a Stick Up! (Counting Money Role Play)

Lately, my son is fascinated with money. I know, you think I mean spending it, right? Nope. He wants to know who’s on each bill and loves the ‘secret’ watermarks you see when you hold the newly designed bills up to the light.

To give him a little practice counting bills, though, I decided to make some funny money for him. (I wasn’t about to risk him losing all of our Monopoly money.) 

I printed several sheets of each denomination (1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, and 100s) on cardstock.

Once I cut the bills apart, it was time I put on my acting hat. I admit; I was pretty rusty (the last time I acted was in an 8^th-grade school play). Thankfully, my son isn’t a tough critic.

Download the clown-faced funny money here.
If you’d rather add your child’s picture to the bills like I did,
e-mail me and I’ll send you the Microsoft Publisher files to adapt.

I told him to pretend he worked at a bank and gave him a (shuffled) random amount of money. He needed to sort the funny money into piles and put the piles in order from smallest to largest denomination. Next, he counted each pile.

I made three columns in his notebook. Down the first column, I wrote each denomination. Over the second column, I wrote “how many?” And under the third column I wrote “how much $?” His task was to write down the number of bills he had in each pile and figure out how much money that amounted to (essentially how much money was “in the bank”). I added all his subtotals up for him.

Then, I held a stick up with a small toy squirt gun (don’t worry, it wasn’t loaded). My son thought I was being funny until I took some bills from each of his piles; then, his jaw dropped.

Now it was time to count the money again, recording the values once more in his notebook. After counting each denomination, he’d look at the previous numbers and tell me things like, “You took three ten-dollar bills.”

After he’d recounted his money, I told him that the police had caught the crook and recovered the money; however, he needed to count it to make sure that they got all the money back.

This was SO much fun that my son never complained about all the counting and subtracting. It really put his skip-counting skills to the test, too. Success!

Let’s Go Fishing (Snacktime Subtraction)

What can you make with colored Goldfish crackers, peanut butter, and pretzels sticks? A snack AND a math game, that’s what.

First I had my son cut out a pond from blue construction paper. Then I gave him a small bowl of colored Goldfish crackers and asked him to put some fish in his lake.

Then he started reading and answering questions on a custom-made worksheet, counting the total number of fish in the pond, as well as the number of red, orange, yellow, and green fish.

Then the real fun began.

Dowload this worksheet here.

I asked my son to dip his fishing rod (a pretzel stick) in peanut butter and "catch" the number of fish specified in the next question. After these fish were caught, how many remained in the pond? What about after you throw some back in?

This was the yummiest math activity we’ve ever done. I know this because my son said, “I like to eat the fishing poles, Mom.” HA!

Wondering what to do with all those leftover pretzels? Have your child make pretzel letters!

Ice Cream Party Math (a SMMARTidea)

Hello! I’m Lisa and I share learning activities for kids on my SMMARTideas blog (Science, Math, Music, Art, Reading and Time-out for Tidbits). I’m excited to share this SMMART Math learning activity with Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational readers!

Ice cream can be a great motivator for your child to demonstrate his/her math skills.  You’ll need some ice cream and little candies, marshmallows, chocolate chips … whatever you have in your pantry.

Display all the fixins in fun glasses and jars out on the table. Then, BRING OUT THE ICE CREAM!

Okay, now for the math. Have your kiddos answer math questions to earn candies and add-ins.

"4 + 6 = the number of chocolate chips you can add into your ice cream."
"50% of 12 is the number of gummy bears you can add to your ice cream."
"Count 7 lemonheads and put them into your ice cream ... good counting!"

Put the add-ins right into a large ceramic bowl and mix it up with two large spoons, then dish into waffle cones. 

I suppose you could even touch on a little geometry ... the cone shape of the ice cream cone, sphere shape of the malted milk balls, or oval jellybeans.

Cool summer fun!

- Lisa at SMMARTideas

Dinosaur Hunt

While my son’s infatuation has matured from dinosaurs to Star Wars, he still finds the prehistoric reptiles interesting. To teach him a little about these creatures, I developed this dinosaur game. I hid five of my son’s plastic dinosaur toys in our living room and gave him a worksheet with this little rhyme to instruct him on what to do.

  

Look in the living room.

Look all around –

up high and down on the ground.

You’re looking for dinosaurs,

so get going!

It’s time to start exploring.

When you have found all five,

bring them to me.

We’ll figure out what their names must be.

After he read this, he set out on the task of finding five hidden dinosaurs. After he’d found a few, I tested his subtraction skills by asking, “You found two. There were five hidden. How many do you have left to find?”

Once all five dinosaurs had been found, he cut out short descriptions I’d typed up about each (I found the information I needed in the World Book's Learning Ladders "World of Dinosaurs" book). I helped him read each description and then he matched them to the corresponding dinosaur.

Dice Roll Math

While shopping at a local store for teachers, I stumbled across some foam dice with numbers on them. I immediately snatched two up – one that had the numbers one through six spelled out and the other with the numbers seven through twelve spelled out.

I created a worksheet for my son with blanks for eight math problems – four addition and four subtraction. At the bottom of the page, I included the numbers one through 25 to help him with the equations.

As he rolled the dice, he had to sound out the words to figure out which numbers would be part of his math problem (have you ever noticed that eight is spelled so wacky?!?). I explained to him that when he did the subtraction problems, the bigger number needed to be written down first.

I also taught him how to use the numbers at the bottom of the page to count forward or backwards to complete the problems.

Like many of the other activities on this site, Dice Roll Math works on a number of skills: 1) reading since the numbers are spelled out (vs. numerals) on the dice, 2) addition and subtraction, and 3) printing (I’m hoping that my son’s 8s stop looking like the infinity symbol soon).

If you can’t find any of these dice to purchase at local retail stores, make your own (see my post on Story Dice for tips on how). And if you’d like a PDF of the Dice Roll Math worksheet I made, download it here; I’m happy to share!